The Dangers of an Infallible Guide

Alan Watts once told a story that has stayed with me.

After giving a talk on Canadian television, an announcer approached him and asked, “If the universe is governed by an intelligent and beneficent God, wouldn’t He naturally provide us with an infallible guide to behavior and to the truth about the universe?”

Watts knew he meant the Bible. He replied, “No, I think nothing of the kind, because I think a loving God would not do something to His children that would rot their brains.”

A loving God doesn’t hand us a rulebook—He gives us a mind.

Divine guidance, as I understand it in spiritual Deism, is not a rigid, infallible code meant to shut down inquiry. It is the natural, ongoing relationship between human reason and the One True God—the perfect, infinite Ground of Being that transcends all form and time.

Reality reveals itself in many ways, and our maturity as observers shapes what we can understand. The universe—what I call the world of Becoming—invites each of us, as conscious beings, to grow through experience, reason, and contemplative practice.

A loving God encourages mental development, right intention, right speech, and right action—not through inflexible dogma, but through the inner movement toward freedom, responsibility, and awakening. Spiritual growth is not obedience; it is transformation. It is the slow, steady refinement of perception and character.

To embrace this path, I live simply, as a contemplative, cultivating solitude, meditation, and mindfulness. My aim is not escape but clarity—living in harmony with nature and all life.

The true guide is not an external, unchanging rulebook. It is the God‑given reason working within us. Guidance unfolds as a continuous journey of awakening, loving others, and living in right relationship with the Earth and all beings. We are meant to wrestle with questions, to grow through effort, to discover wisdom through experience.

God does not do the work for us. God gave us the tools; we must use them.

Liar, Lunatic, Lord, or Legend

Here I want to address the false dilemma created by C.S. Lewis’s famous “Trilemma” argument—often summed up as: Jesus is either a Liar, a Lunatic, or the Lord.4.

It’s a false dilemma because there are more possibilities than just those three. One obvious option Lewis overlooks is that the New Testament may be, in large part, legendary.

Lewis challenges the popular notion that Jesus was merely a great moral teacher. He argues that, based on the radical claims Jesus made—especially about being divine (assuming the New Testament is accurate)—there are only three logical possibilities:

– Liar: If Jesus knowingly made false claims about being God, then he was deliberately deceiving people. That would make him morally corrupt, not a great teacher.
– Lunatic: If Jesus truly believed he was God but was mistaken, then he was delusional—on par with someone who thinks they’re a poached egg, as Lewis colorfully puts it.
– Lord: If Jesus’s claims were true, then he is who he said he was—the Son of God—and deserves worship.

Lewis concludes: “He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

While compelling to many, critics argue that Lewis’s trilemma is a false dilemma—it oversimplifies the possibilities. For example:

– Most scholars doubt whether the historical Jesus explicitly claimed divinity in the way Lewis assumes.
– Others suggest alternative interpretations: Jesus could have been misunderstood, mythologized, or misrepresented by later followers.

Once you’ve engaged in textual and historical criticism—and examined the contradictions within the gospels—it becomes difficult to accept a univocal account. In other words, there are competing ideas about what Jesus might have said, should have said, and actually said.

As Thomas Moore rightly points out, “As scholars have pointed out for over a century, the four Gospels are riddled with the interpretations, biases and agendas of their editors.” In other words, they should be read as propaganda, not history.

The challenge is that it’s hard to disentangle which parts are authentic and which are later additions. But if you follow the chronological development of the gospels, it appears that the portrayal of Jesus’s divinity evolved over time. Initially, he may have claimed to be no more than the Messiah. Over the decades, his status was elevated—culminating in the Council of Nicaea, where he was officially declared divine.

My view is that the Jesus of the gospels is largely legendary. That makes Lewis’s three choices a false dilemma. Jesus may have been revered as a spiritual master, but not as God incarnate. Which means the original followers of Jesus were the Ebionites, who traced their origins to the Jerusalem Church led by James, the brother of Jesus.